Weighed and Measured
by AmberPalette
Summary: A challenge from my friend Llybian Minamino: What were Xelloss's thoughts when he held Filia hostage to try and force the Supreme Elder's hand during Slayers TRY?  Pairing: Xelloss X Filia.


**Weighed and Measured**

A Slayers One-Shot

By Amber C.S. ("AmberPalette")

The shrieking of mangled corpses falling to their deaths outside the temple where he faced off with her ancient and heartless Supreme Elder. Deaths at the hands of two tyrannical gods of another world. This provided him leverage. Time. An opening. She dropped her guard, turned her warm, pale head toward the howling distraction. He lunged.

He seized and twisted her arm. He marveled at how her flesh gave so softly under his steely fingers as he slid his staff, his weapon, across the expanse of her neck, pinning her against him.

"Make one move and you're dead, Filia." Spoken with the honest precision of one who had been what he was, and done a damned good job at it, for over a millennium.

She protested, the feisty maiden under siege, with a shrill demand of "Why, Xelloss? What are you doing?" but the Wolf draped his wooden staff across Red Riding Hood's neck like a lethally eager scythe before wavering golden wheat. Ready.

Close proximity to a subject of practical interest had many benefits. As he secured his grasp of Filia Ul Copt's body in the Temple, or Tomb, of the Ancient Dragons, while an unforgiving icy wind howled desolately outside, Xelloss Metallium conducted a mental survey of her physical vessel.

Bodies…they were so alien to a mazoku, which was merely a dense accumulation of spirit particulates. Bodies were not souls, a demon was told, they merely harbored them…but so much value, so much intimate expression, so much personal identification, could be offered them. Parts of bodies became indices of emotional and psychic significance. They became symbolic of facets of that soul at the same time as they literally housed it.

For instance….

Two great gaping cornflower-hued eyes could be naked, raw, unbridled but still virginal.

Two long, slender ears which came to a pointed crest could be severe, cutting, harsh, even dogmatic.

Yet two fine-boned cheeks the hue of a frost-dusted rose could be a repressed sweetness, a defiant vitality, a yet-full reservoir of glowing innocence.

A mane of creamy canary-belly hair, something one might find on a feral, bucking mare, or in a waterfall of the sun, could suggest a superficial appearance of insubstantiality and goodliness, but an inner miasma of ferocity. Hair, hair….hair that smelled like the early hours of a summer day. Hair to be tangled, ripped out, broken off mid-length, cut….

Fondled. Stroked. Caressed. Kissed. Purely for…scientific…reasons….

Sunlight hair brushing ticklishly against the jaw, neck, clavicle, belly, and lower, of a thing of the shadows. Xelloss must speak to the Greater Beast about disabling the sensation of ticklishness on his false skin, very soon….

Two breasts could be two maternal nests. Filia's breasts were both firm and soft as Xelloss's staff-arm brushed the two masses to rise to her neck. They swelled to twin peaks which hardened in fear and fury at his intimate proximity. What did a living creature's milk taste like? What would this woman ever do if he tried to taste, to have a nibble? What poison would she think his wolf's, cat's, snake's, beast's fangs had infused into her system? And would it be worth the mental acrobatics of pitching to the Greater Beast that he had merely been conducting an experiment in the weak spots of his latest prey?

There, now, in his mind, the itinerary had been sufficiently recorded. Xelloss knew exactly what he clasped against himself with every attempt at leering malice.

That was what he would tell himself.

"Believe me, Supreme Elder, I would enjoy nothing more than killing her. Now open the barrier to the Darkstar Weapon."

Hrm. That was….more brutal than he had intended it to sound. He wasn't sure what the cause for overcompensation had been. Filia was far too amusing to top his list of things to kill with relish. Far, far too amusing.

The retort of Xelloss's current adversary was immediate and merciless: "It doesn't matter. I will not comply. I will not threaten the peace of this world for _her." _

What?

It didn't…matter?

It, HA. It. She….

SHE didn't matter?

To her own….?

Miscalculation, miscalculation. Regroup.

Still the Lesser Beast felt his mouth slacken like an imbecile's.

His fingers itched to seize the Supreme Elder by his trailing white cornhusk of a beard and force him to gaze into Filia, into her face and soul, to smell that clean scent and feel those firm bones under all those layers of frothy pink, recognize—RECOGNIZE!—her captivating duality.

A woman who crafted bone china crockery and wielded a mace! A woman prone equally to Valkyrian rampages as to reading tea leaves between delicate fingers.

How could her wonderful, magnificent, irreplaceable, maddeningly enigmatic strangeness be so…_undervalued_?

Her silly stupid plodding adherence to dusty conventions and sleepy norms, that made him want to pat her cheeks, chuckling indulgently… and yet pinch them just under each gaping blue eyeball and peel them back right off the bone like slabs of raw bacon. Silly stupid wastefully beautiful brilliant….MADDENING creature….! Certainly hate her, certainly—but simply feel nothing but tepid disregard for her?

How?

Lines from a holy tome deafened Xelloss, lines about a powerful man rendered impotent by a beautiful woman who took shears to his long hair.

Filia had taken shears to Xelloss's hair. Filia. Just by existing. Just by her infuriating proximity. Filia. His first great logistical miscalculation had rendered him a Sampson.

Why?

Because he had overestimated the worth of a living woman.

A dragon, no less.

Wonderful, magnificent, irreplaceable, maddeningly enigmatic strangeness…

Oh.

He had just described himself.

Was Filia…his inversion? His mirror image….?

The mirror cracked. Xelloss consciously pulled his crotch away from his hostage's buttocks. It wasn't as if he was subject to the vicissitudes of mortal male arousal, but…caution seemed apt, all of a sudden. Excessive caution. He had erred. And now he stood in screamingly awkward silence before his scaly ant of an adversary, without a comeback, eyes nakedly open, jaw ajar.

Because he had overestimated Filia Ul Copt's value.

"Aren't you her…?" Father? The question wriggled its way audibly out of him. But audible only to himself, and to his hostage, whose pulse and breathing accelerated—pulse and breathing, evidence that she was anathema to his race of death and disarray.

Xelloss chose not to reiterate the question more loudly. He wasn't sure why, he only knew that the decision was based on sensing Filia's physiological response even to it being murmured. An impulsive decision, which lacked logistical follow-through. The choice to keep the question to himself certainly lacked his peculiar brand of selfless selflessness in service to the Greater Beast, since asking it again would have nicely baited his adversary, flustered the Supreme Elder, and lured him to a convenient demise at Xelloss's hands. This epiphany sat uneasily within Xelloss, because it meant he had just done something….

Kind.

His arm tightened around Filia's throat. It was no easy feat, for it pressed that distracting, rushing heartbeat against his cold unliving wrist as well.

What a glorious jugular she had.

_FOCUS. _

Xelloss came out of his reverie just in time to hear spectacularly bad news.

"Your demands are useless. We servants of the gods do not know how to break this barrier. We don't have the power. " The Supreme Elder whet his lips, crackled like parched desert land, and fixed his hard ore eyes on Xelloss, thinking himself victorious.

Indeed, Xelloss's mind reeled before it recalibrated to "kamikaze" mode, and recalled the entire purpose of his presence in these murky catacombs, one which, pity of pities, had nothing to do with blond hair, blue eyes, ample breasts, or the delicious paradox of a rogue priestess.

"Oh?" he purred, voice cracking just a little. And it might not have been because of the "oh shit" work-related moment. It might have had more to do with that tasty series of self-contradictions still pressed against the mazoku. Perhaps.

Filia Ul Copt's smug idiot of an underestimater elaborated, and Xelloss found his shock, which had elicited candor from the old lizard, would ultimately serve as an asset. He tried not to sneer too demeaningly as the Supreme Elder blew hot air: "This final barrier wasn't cast by us. It was cast by the ancient dragons themselves thousands of years ago."

Now Filia wiggled sharply against Xelloss, as if he had stuck a livewire against the back of her neck in order solely to watch her squirm. The thought of doing so carried a strangely potent shockwave of eroticism as Xelloss again backed his crotch away from Filia, and as she bleated out an "AH?" of disbelief.

At the same time, the drunken desire to stroke her hair and croon her on in her mounting sentiments of poison and betrayal, which he tasted in droves flying ferally off her core, licked up inside Xelloss, as cajoling and buttery a desire as his sadistic fantasy was hard and staggering. He honed on it mentally, this new distraction, the desire to aid Filia in her rebellion, to open her ingénue eyes to the double-standards of her own race, every bit as vicious, every bit as genocidal, as his—the alien, alien urge to JUSTIFY himself to Filia Ul Copt, and earn a glimmer of approval from her.

Oh, _damn. _

Further back went his crotch, until with greater horror still he realized that his lust had nothing to do with these feelings.

They were separate, softer, more delicate, but somehow stronger.

They were whispers, but rooted and enduring ones.

They were what all those doe-eyed short-lived human poets moaned about, they were the stuff of a bouquet of wildflowers picked in frost or the rain, at cost to self.

They were feelings at direct odds with base, Machiavellian survival.

_FOCUS. _

The Supreme Elder was still palavering. Nine hells, he had a set of lungs for something older than the moldy hillside.

"With this final weapon," the old one drawled out his well-recited half-truths, "the ancient dragons turned against we who depended on the gods. But we destroyed them all before they could become enemies of the world, and then we left the Darkstar Weapon sealed behind this barrier they created."

"NO!" Filia retorted more sharply now, arching her back defiantly against Xelloss.

The mazoku gave up resistance and responsively snaked up against her spine, spooning their bodies unnecessarily close, and felt something in his nether-regions becoming hot, throbbing, and tight.

_Hrm. _

"It can't be! It's a lie!"

A weirdly triumphant smile slithered across Xelloss's face—his best disturbing combination of cold, serpentine thinness, and dimples.

He was not smiling for himself, however, and if he hadn't been quite so intoxicated with the sensation that Filia no longer was held BY his arms, but held IN them, he might have been disturbed that somewhere between the hostaging and the barbed verbal repartee, he had become Filia Ul Copt's cheerleader and advocate.

_HRMMMM. _

A blinding, hilariously vivid mental image brick-smacked Xelloss, of Filia inviting him to the Supreme Elder's condominium in some balmly retirement community for dinner, of Xelloss and the Supreme Elder sharing cigars but then bickering over politics, of Filia standing at the dinner table and overturning her plate of broccoli casserole (or it could be shrimp casserole if one preferred), and telling the Supreme Elder she stood by Xelloss's efforts to expand her mind and was not a hatchling fed dogma anymore, that she was moving into her own apartment, piercing her nose, and fornicating with the mazoku nightly just to give the Supreme Elder a conniption….

Oh. The Supreme Elder was still talking.

_FOCUS. _

"After that we kept the Darkstar Weapon sealed beyond the eyes of all the others, beyond that we cast many more barriers in order to protect it."

_Well DUH,_ Xelloss wanted to snap, suddenly impatient with having to perform any work-related tasks at all this evening.

"It's not true!" Filia persisted, and in Xellos's mind had her tongue pierced as well; his smile grew a mile wide on his pale face in the tomb and he was struggling not to erupt in giddy giggles as the dragoness declared in the face of her ultimate authority, "I won't believe it! You're lying!"

_WELL DUH. Let's pierce your navel, too…It'll look funny in dragon form. _

"Weren't they all killed because they refused to fight by your side?"

_Good girl, get him! SIC! That's my exquisite paradox. _

The Supreme Elder predictably blustered. "Silence, Filia!"

_Of course, effectively confirming all of Filia's suspicions. Not a bad interrogation tactic, Filia. Not bad at all. _

"No matter what the ancient dragons' intentions were, only we, the golden dragons, could be trusted to possess a weapon this powerful!"

Oh, stale chauvinism. Hackneyed hegemonic entitlement.

_Guess what, Supreme Elder? Not only did you just win me the Darkstar Weapon, you let me steal what was yours. Don't value her, do you? _

_Well, she has been weighed and measured. _

_She is perversion and potential._

_I'll take her if you won't. Since I don't have to kill her, I'll take Filia Ul Copt, when this is all over. _

_This may just be the beginning of something ridiculous and beautiful. _

Xelloss spoke at last, saturating his voice with his marvelously snide, faux-factual cheer. "It appears the ancient dragons hid the Darkstar Weapon inside this barrier because they didn't want you to get it." He fixed his face, with every fiber of deliberate derision he possessed, into a smile that was condescendingly accusatory: a triumphant parent smugly holding out evidence of a child's tantruming misbehavior. "I think they knew what that would have meant, supreme elder."

He had won the battle of cognitive gymnastics: and by acknowledging the value of her moment of rebellion, he had appropriated his foe's "useless" protégé as his own.

Xelloss had stolen Filia—and simply because he had decided she was worth the stealing.

"It seems that the ancient dragons used their power to invert the Darkstar Weapon's energy to create this barrier, meaning the only one who could break it would have to be descended from the ancient dragons themselves."

And with that the demon extricated himself from his mirror image, spilling Filia onto the floor of the Ancient Dragons's violated temple, preparing to do combat with her idiot former leader, who clearly had no capacity whatsoever to measure the true value of anything.

Well Xelloss could measure. There had been no error here, no. The Supreme Elder, no ancient dragon, with a vacuous mind and an overly zealous judgmentalism, was worthless.

"Prepare to die," Xelloss hissed at the trash before him, while crouching forward like a lupine mantis.

And Filia Ul Copt, the messy perfection, the beautiful paradox, was a trove.

Oh hell. "You alright?" he murmured downward at his former hostage, without removing his eyes from his opponent.

"I'm not speaking to you right now, you steaming pile of purple turds." Filia, trembling, readying herself to intercede in the battle to ensue, still mustered this insult, and rolled to the side while smoothing down her pink skirts.

Yes, a trove. "Careful, Filia. Your Stockholm Syndrome is showing. Poop is a step up from raw garbage."

"My WHAT? What sick thing did you just call me?"

"By the way, funny thing about hostages: the most skilled manipulator never has to carry out the threat, because he figures the thing he's snatched has great value."

A silence.

Xelloss looked down into the red, constricted, ready-to-erupt face of his overestimation.

"I WON'T LET YOU, YOU POMPOUS FILTH!" Filia shrieked up at him. Her tail shot out from her skirts and she reeled to her feet. Blond hair, ample breasts, blue eyes, delicious paradox and all. She was casting some kind of holy spell.

Perfect.

"Hold that thought," Xelloss chirped, putting together in his mind a series of logistical points…dead elder, fusion magic, slice open the barrier…kill off Darkstar, pierce Filia's nose, tongue, and navel, and explore her. Explore her for many years, and in great detail.

For purely scientific reasons.

With that plan in mind, the mazoku fired off a razor army of black cones at the Supreme Elder, waited contentedly for Filia's Chaotic Disintegrate, and swallowed up its humming, searing whiteness into his staff, preparing to break open the Ancient Dragon barrier.

"JUST what I've been waiting for!"

_I think I'm in L._

_O._

_V._

_You get the idea. _

_In the name of curiosity and analysis, of course._

_Let me put a price tag on you, dear Filly. _

"And now it's all MINE!" Fusion magic in hands, Xelloss propelled toward his goal.

_Yes, oh yes. _

_You are a trove. _


End file.
